People Building Peace 2.0

People Building Peace 2.0 is a collection of 25 stories of peace

To spread the word about the Peace Portal among the peacebuilding community, we organised an online writing contest: the Stories of Peace Challenge. The goal was to gather personal stories from all over the world about peace initiatives from people active in peacebuilding and conflict prevention. Out of over 80 entries submitted, almost 60 were approved to enter the contest and published on the Peace Portal (you can read them all by clicking here). On September 21st 2011, the International Day of Peace, 25 winners were selected by a jury of peacebuilding experts.

The winning stories were published in our book, People Building Peace 2.0. The book marks the third in GPPAC's People Building Peace series, a collection of case studies and stories on civil society-led peacebuilding initiatives.

This book represents a unique insight into the peacebuilding world and we are happy that our challenge gave voices to many, everyday life stories of peace that otherwise will not easily find a place in a publication, but that were brought together on the Peace Portal.

The book contains not only the 25 winning Stories of Peace, but also offers an interesting overview on the evolving role of social media in the field of conflict prevention. In the first section of People Building Peace 2.0, GPPAC's Programme Manager of Preventive Action and Human Security William Tsuma reflects on the role of information in crowd sourcing for conflict prevention, while Vladimir Bratic (Assistant Professor in Media and Communication at Hollins University) provides an overview of the evolving role of media (from traditional, to ‘new' media) in peacebuilding. The book closes with a reflection from the jury and from GPPAC Executive Director, Peter van Tuijl.

The author of the best story, Francois Lenfant, received the first copy of the book at the Peace Portal Launch, which took place in The Hague (NL) on January 26th 2012.

People Building Peace

The Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict has published two other books in the series 'People Building Peace.' These books are a collection of case studies of civil society's peacebuilding initiatives.

The Peace Portal is an initiative of the GPPAC Foundation supported by the Netherlands Ministry of Economic Affairs and the City of The Hague. The Peace Portal has been developed in partnership with other civil society organisations, inside and outside the Netherlands.